I have a Demon Steed now, he's pretty cool. Ice steed is nice too. Different horses are better for different missions and weather conditions. Missions? Weather? Sounds kinda cool at first.

Unfortunately, the entire game around the horses is a mediocre, repetitive grind of the same elements over and over again. Press the arrow in different directions at the right time to jump over obstacles on the side-scroller style course, forge new horse shoes, and make new herbal concoctions for your horses. Forging magical horseshoes? That cant be THAT bad! No really, it's not as exciting as it sounds.

To further bum me out, the "quests" that your horsie can go on (which i envisioned would be semi-fun, given the rpg style of horse level-up) amount to them trotting off the screen and a timer displays. When they return, youre given your loot and a description of the conquest.

Worse yet, in order to make a level three horse, you need to breed 2 level two horses. To make a level four, you need to breed 2 level 3's. Since you use up your higher level horses making the next higher level (they cant be bred again) you have to go about training/ breeding/training another horse to breed w/ the highest progeny to get the next level horse. It's mind-bendingingly boring and tedious and literally put me to bed early a couple nights in a row… ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

I'll update my game blog w/ some details at the end of the weekend.

Betrayal at Krondor is now officially kicking my ass, with Nighthawks coming out of the woodwork messing up my crew left and right. Just when I start feeling good, I get totally owned. My mage gets totally ridden so he cant cast a spell, making muscle my only way out - and when youre surrounded it turns into a battle of luck and attrition.
Oh good, my entire party now all have a collective total of 12 health again. What's that, another rusting in the woods as I'm attacked again? It's a good story wrapped around frustrating, difficult, and pretty ugly gameplay. Maybe I ought to stick to the horsie thing! ='.'=

— I dont dislike people - I just like them better when theyre not around

Originally Posted by xSamhainx
To further bum me out, the "quests" that your horsie can go on (which i envisioned would be semi-fun, given the rpg style of horse level-up) amount to them trotting off the screen and a timer displays. When they return, youre given your loot and a description of the conquest.

I'm in the process of finishing Risen. Aaaah, this is like Gothic all over again. Same feeling, same mechanics, same ugly visages. So wonderful !
I'm also playing Lego Star Wars II with sonny, which is a lot of fun as well, even though he always wants to play as Leia.
Then I just installed Command & Conquer 4 last night, but I haven't come far enough to know what to think about it yet. I just made it to the point where I had to declare my allegiance to a side.

King Arthur: The Roleplaying War Game - Really like the mix of rpg and strategy. A big bonus is the text based quests where you get different choices depending on your skills. Feels old school and nice. The big drawback is that the game has a lot of game breaking bugs. My campaign has come to a halt and now I'm stuck without a save game that lets me go back to before things started to go amiss. I think I did some quests in the "wrong" order. I've sent my savegame to the developers but they haven't replied. It seems like a lot of people are having the same kinds of problems from reading their forums. Even if they patch it I'm assuming I'm still screwed. Feels shitty since I'm about 35 hours into the game.

Mount & Blade: Warband - Having huge amounts of fun with this one. The feeling of charging an enemy army or defending/besieging a castle is great. Right now there is a big lull though, my faction is at peace with everyone and I'm itching to go plunder something. My men are getting restless and I need some action damnit. I guess there isn't much of a story, if any, and I haven't come across a main story line. But I guess there isn't one in these games?

Brutal Legend - open world classic heavy metal fantasy heaven. I love this game and am almost ready to claim my 360 purchase is validated by it's mighty presence alone.

Probably not for everyone, but for me, to be able to cruise around an open world listening to classic metal while gunning dudes down, watching my metal minons at war w/ the enemy (or fighting alongside them), is just fun as hell. Then, i can tame the beasts of the land and ride around on one of them, and now even summon animals to cruise around and fight w/ me. Guitar solo abilities like the " facemelter" literally do just that, and are insta- kills on packs of foes. While listening to metal.
Great game, kind of a cross between Sacrifice and … Something. I dunno, but if you have a 360 and like classic metal, sammy wholeheartedly recommends this one

— I dont dislike people - I just like them better when theyre not around

Started up a Might & Magic 7 game just to nostalgically fool around with the character creation screen; should have known that's like passing the crack pipe to Winehouse. I'm now headed for the Barrow Downs to con the dwarves into rebuilding my castle from which I have just cleared the pesky rats and goblins. I'll be getting Eschalon Book II sometimes this week, though, so that may distract me from fullscale dependency issues.

Originally Posted by GhanBuriGhan
Took a break from G3 until they (hopefully) fix the ATI 4xxx problems with the character shadows. So now playing Risen. Accumulating more and more quests in the Harbor City and not solving any…

So… what are you trying to (but cannot) solve? Just finished Risen a few days ago…

Originally Posted by JDR13
Eh? I just put a Radeon 4890 in my rig, what are these problems with G3?

At least some of the 4XXX and 5XXX cards have issues with character shadows - either no shadows (like in my case, I have no character shadows, except from the torch), or flickering. They are planning a CP version 1.74 that should fix it, so I am waiting for that. Apparently one specific catalyst version did not have the problem, but I don't want to roll back just for one game.

I have to say I liked this a lot more than Origins. There was no stupid romance, no horribly long and tedious dungeons. I liked most of NPCs. I was particulary fond of Nathiel. I really liked how that NPC developed over time. Anders was funny and I liked Justice character too. I disliked 2 female NPCs. Valena irritated me to no ends and Sigrun didn't really stand out.

One thing that was extremely disappointing was that they didn't really explain things well enough. I mean, yeah you can guess that Utha liked Archtect philosophy on *breaking cycle* and stop the blight, but why can't she talk and why is she diseased? Why did Siranni (velana's sister) join Archtect and where the hell did she go? Why did Archtect create The Mother and if he created her, why does he fear her so? She's just a one of many Broodmothers. What does he mean *his most flawed creation*? How did he create her? He can't say he *created* her if all he's done is simply freeing her just like rest of the darkspawns. He was conducting experiments on people in his lair. Why is he doing that? He already know how to *free* darkspawns. Too many things were unexplained and I found myself extremely disappointed with it.

Tropico 3. I had bought this one on Steam last weekend, when it was $7.50. Can't go wrong for that price.

I'm having lots of fun. In principle, you play a Caribbean dictator who develops his little island into a thriving community, avoids getting ousted in a coup or by losing an election or getting invaded by the US or USSR. It's a little bit like SimCity with a very energetic latin American soundtrack.

You can throw people into prison, let them get killed, kick them out of your tiny country, etc. But I guess I'm a wuss, so I have only played nice so far and even held fair elections . This way, the game is much like a very simple SimCity. Anyway, I quite like it.